Land of the Blind
by Andy Owen
Style: Literary Fiction / Warfare
ISBN: 9781611794342
Print Size: 200 pages
Writer: Fireship Press
Reviewed by Peggy Kurkowski
A searing fictionalized memoir about exacting private vengeance after a roadside bomb kills a good friend in Afghanistan
“Warfare zones are locations of human extremes,” and for Andy Owens’s unnamed narrator within the shifting novel Land of the Blind, in addition they ceaselessly change those that make it out.
Afghanistan 2007. Owens’s protagonist, a Royal Marine captain, and his small workforce hooked up to the Afghan Nationwide Safety Directive, make a go to to an Afghan Nationwide Military checkpoint alongside the street linking Kandahar with the capital of Helmand Province. What occurs to his shut good friend and fellow soldier, Jim, kinds the nucleus of Owens’s story about grief, revenge, and regret.
A narrative brilliantly structured round fragments of his protagonist’s experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan within the mid-2000s, Land of the Blind is so persuasive in its authenticity that one forgets it’s fiction. In some methods, Owen’s assortment of reminiscence fragments—from his becoming a member of the army in 2004, his army intelligence experiences in Iraq, and his Woolfian “moments of being” in battle—is harking back to one other stellar “fictional” assortment of warfare tales, All of the Issues They Carried by Tim O’Brien.
The loss of life that adjustments every part informs the start because the Marine captain packs up Jim’s bunk and private belongings, struck by the unfinished e book on his mattress. However the narrative quickly begins to circulate forwards and backwards in time, with Owens’s narrator reflecting on his friendship with Jim, who is sort of a Zen philosopher-king: “Jim thought we have been all groping at midnight … He would typically pronounce, when he accurately forecasted a destructive end result to a coalition operation, ‘Within the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.’”
Grappling with grief and rage, the narrator is gradual to share the precise description of Jim’s loss of life (coming over midway by means of the e book), however as soon as he does, the story takes on the extra fictional story, as he and his two closest teammates, Gary and Chris, make use of the assistance of their Afghan intelligence counterpart, Khalid, to search out the particular person accountable for planting the bomb that killed Jim. Armed with that intelligence, they act on their anger and ache—however to what finish?
“Loss of life is just not the best loss in life. The best loss is what dies inside us whereas we dwell, because of the experiences now we have and what we determine to do.”
The query “did I do the proper factor?” reverberates all through Land of the Blind, which additionally serves as a collective question for America and the UK and their wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Owens’s perspective to the “unending” wars of the early 2000s is clearly said within the voice of his disillusioned protagonist: “We had failed not solely to impact the adjustments we thought we have been making in Afghanistan but additionally to see the way it was altering us.” However nonetheless, the absurd and profound are intricately certain up within the narrator’s reminiscences, a few of that are fairly humorous (Operation Rooster Dinner, for one).
In little beneath 2 hundred pages, Owens delivers a strong meditation on friendship, life, and sacrifice not quickly forgotten. An vital postscript concerning the 2021 withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan and the narrator’s efforts to safe the escape of Afghan allies offers a bittersweet coda. Because the narrator displays on Afghanistan, his teammates, their actions, and what the warfare was about, all of it comes again to a matter of imaginative and prescient. “If anybody was blind to what was occurring it was us,” he says.
Haunting, evocative, and superbly written, Land of the Blind is a compelling and well timed exploration of the tangible and intangible casualties of warfare. I extremely advocate this e book.
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